New NSW Grants Regulations: Are You Ready?

The New South Wales (NSW) government has announced plans to strengthen the regulation of grants (Government Sector Finance Amendment (Grants) Bill 2023). The proposed changes are designed to improve accountability and transparency, align legislation with the principles set out in the NSW Grants Administration Guide, and to ensure that grants are used effectively and efficiently.

The key changes include:

• Requiring Ministers and government officials to consider factors such as outcomes, value for money, efficient use of money, and probity when approving or rejecting grants.
• Making grant information publicly available, including the amount of the grant, the recipient, and the purpose of the grant (disclosed under NSW’s ‘open access’ regulations, unless a valid public interest for non-disclosure exists).
• Fast-track disaster grants will be classified as high risk by default and require all grant details to be sent to the Auditor-General within three months of approval.
• Establishing a new grants advisory body to provide independent advice to the government on grants policy.

We believe this bill is a positive step forward and has important implications for grant administrators in NSW, including improving grants regulation compliance through your grants management solution.

Modern grants systems should be underpinned by cloud-based, agile, and human-centric modern technology. This technology should be scalable and configurable to accommodate new processes and changes to rules and regulations. We also believe that your grants management solution will be vital to improving grants compliance by adhering to a set of standardised business processes ‘codified’ in the platform.

While the specific requirements of the new regulations are not yet published, we anticipate that they will mandate the following:

Transparent processes throughout the grant lifecycle

Clarity in the assessment criteria so that grantees and grantors have access to the mechanics and decision-making behind evaluations

Audit trails and logs as to who can read, review and decide upon applications

Analytics that can demonstrate both forecast and historical views of all aspects of a grant – to determine consistency and fairness is applied and anomalies are detected and reported upon for action  

How Deloitte can support you in your transition to the new regulations

We have a team of experienced professionals who can help you navigate the new regulations, improve your grants management, and select the right technology.

A word from the team...

Deloitte’s Grants Operations practice has been at the forefront of grant assurance, program governance and operations for years, achieving leadership across the grant lifecycle within state and federal governments through to local grants providers.

This challenge isn’t unique to Australia and several countries have collaborated to build Deloitte GrantsConnect, a Salesforce-based solution that provides end-to-end grants lifecyle management for agencies and departments of all sizes - it is flexible, regulation-compliant, and easy to update to keep pace with the changing environment.